Chapter 37 #2
“Your little ivy tattoo was quite the clue to the depths of Selene’s treachery.
But I’ll let you in on a little secret—she wouldn’t have needed to make a deal with Nobus if she hadn’t helped your mother kidnap you in the first place.
The portal was her attempt to get back in my brother’s good graces.
Dangling the carrot of his stolen son returning home one day.
But I’m giving him something even better—an entire realm of devoted worshippers.
And you two will be my greatest offering yet.
The Wolf God will run free in the Great Wildes once again. ”
The traitorous brother of the God King pulls a golden dagger from the sheath at his side and slices through Cal’s leather pants leg in a single swipe. Crimson spreads across the tattooed ivy leaves as the captain bites down a scream.
“Are you watching, Ivy?” Marks casts a look over his shoulder, menace shining in his golden eyes as he increases the speed of the flames moving across the floor. “Whatever pathetic emotion you think you feel for my nephew isn’t real. Gods don’t care about something as trivial as feelings.”
Fire engulfs the bolt as I yank fruitlessly on the unyielding chain. I reach inward for my power to find the seedling of magic slowly spreading. It’s still not enough to wield. I need more time.
Mark’s maniacal laugh resounds through the throne room as I writhe on the ground to escape the encroaching flames. His eyes sparkle as his words hit, words that don’t have their intended sting.
I may never have had a say in my fate’s connection to Cal’s, but I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that what I feel for him is real. And I’m ready to make my choice.
“Wield it!” he screams at Cal, kicking him again and again as the captain’s body curls inward.
Circling him, Marks flexes his power, sucking the air from the room once more. He’s so consumed with inflicting pain on Cal that he doesn’t realize the fire banks at the loss of oxygen, buying me precious seconds to grow my seedling of magic.
The Wolf God runs the blade’s edge up the backs of Cal’s legs, blood pouring onto the white stone floors. I expect to hear Cal’s hoarse scream, but it doesn’t come. I see every ounce of the pain etched into his gray eyes, but his face remains stoic.
My heart cracks at the sight of him: a man who is no stranger to being on the receiving end of this kind of torture.
“Such a shame. Something as meaningless as the mortal realm shouldn’t stifle the infinite power of the Prince of the Gods. You’re weak, just like your father.”
The storm cloud eyes of the Prince of the Gods search mine from across the floor. But they don’t find shock or hurt or anger looking back at them in light of this revelation. My mother gave me his true identity days ago.
“Nobus thought sending me here would weaken me, but the only weakness here is you.” I watch helplessly as Marks continues kicking, his boot now coated in his nephew’s blood.
Cal’s pain radiates throughout the throne room, ricocheting off the walls and piercing my dying soul. Pain that began twenty-six years ago when my mother helped kidnap him, when he was stolen in the night and taken to the human realm to live out his days, never to see his parents again.
The Prince of the Gods, fate-bound to me. A god who could have chosen to hate me for what my mother helped his family do but instead chose to love me. Not for what my magic could do, but for who I am in spite of myself.
The seedling of power within me spreads.
Marks loosens his grip on his magic and Cal flails at the sudden influx of oxygen, his whole body moving in great gasps. Fire resumes its ascent up the iron chain links as the Wolf God turns his attention towards me.
“It’s me you want. I’m the one who can open the portal.” I rise to my knees on the floor, willing my face not to show the panic coursing through my body.
“You?” Marks laughs again, moving across the room to stand over me. “You think you have the power to unite the gods? Oh, this is too good.”
His heavy-booted foot meets my chest in a swift kick, knocking me backwards onto the ground.
“You wield a single element and some fancy shadows thanks to your father. That is not power, you fool. Callan here has power. The raw power of a king runs through his veins, and as soon as my nephew unleashes the magic that I know he’s capable of, he will open the portal so I can return home and show Nobus what it looks like to truly rule a realm. ”
Cal’s magic tingles in the air, weak and barely recognizable from the unimaginable horrors that have been forced upon him, but it’s there. The Wolf God’s chest constricts slightly as if something, or someone, is squeezing the blood pumping through his heart.
“Your magic cannot overtake me, boy,” he bellows. “You have always been destined to die in this realm, one way or another. Do not waste your last moments fighting for her.”
Marks grabs a fistful of my hair, hauling me to a seated position as the flames crest the final link of my chain.
The cold steel of his blade bites my neck, warm rivulets of blood trickling down the column of my throat as my eyes meet Cal’s across the room—despairing eyes pleading with me for forgiveness.
He can’t save me and he knows it.
“What will it be, Prince? Will you wield your full power before or after I slit her throat?”
Fire engulfs the iron around my wrists, but I do not feel its heat. Not as my magic flares back to life within my veins, the full force of it overtaking me as I will it to calm.
Using the only element that Marks knows me to wield, I command the earth to tremble beneath our feet. Cracks spider web across the great windows as the walls of the palace shake under my command.
“That’s it, boy. More!” he yells, pressing the blade deeper into my skin.
Even now, faced head on with magic that is undoubtedly mine, Marks denies the magnitude of my power, once again unable to fathom the endless depths of a woman. Layers of rage and love stitched together generation after generation to create seamless, exquisite beings.
The marble columns holding up the vaulted ceiling crack, chunks crashing to the floor as the brave soldiers of Corinth scream and run towards the exit. The smell of my burning flesh fills my nostrils as I dig deeper into my power. Death has come for me at last and I am ready for it.
“Cal,” I call out on a shaky breath preparing myself to make one final choice.
When I am gone, there can be no doubt that this was for him. For the love that I denied because I believed myself unworthy, but the love I deserved all along. For the promise of what he will do for this world in my memory.
Death chose me, but I choose Cal.
I do not know what my first words were, but I know what my last words will be. “I love you.”
With a final exhale, I open the floodgates within me to release every ounce of the magic that I have kept locked away for eighteen years.
I rip open every wound, every scar to find any pocket of pain, hatred, or terror still hiding in my bones.
Deeper and deeper I go, unburying graves and skeletons that I forced from my mind years ago.
My body vibrates with power and I know I am primed to explode.
The outer walls of the throne room crumble as Cal calls out for me to stop. The Wolf God drops his knife and staggers back in shock as he recognizes for the first time what I am truly capable of. The woman he always underestimated will kill him even if it kills her too.
“You,” he gasps, black pupils overtaking his golden eyes, a sign of his magic rising within him.
With that, Marks sheds his mortal persona, fully becoming Mikais, the heretical god he’s hidden behind a human facade for so many years.
He doesn’t have time to form another word before the column of my sparkling magic barrels into his chest. A scream rips from my throat as I push more and more power out of my body and into his.
I call forth the fire in his veins first. Mikais falls to his knees, the smell of his burnt flesh mixing with mine as I roast him from the inside out.
But it isn’t enough to kill a god.
I dig deeper, looking for any emotion that I can draw upon.
I think of the man who raised me, the man I called a father, now rotting in a grave desecrated by the Lord General’s soldiers.
I think of my mother, a goddess who followed a misguided leader but still loved her people enough to buy them a way home.
I think of Cal’s mother, of the Goddess of Protection so afraid of Nobus’ influence that she hatched a plan to have her son smuggled away.
I curl my fists into tight balls, finally allowing tears to fall. Blood pours from Mikais’ eyes, nose, and mouth mirroring the salty liquid streaming down my face as I command the water in his veins.
Thick vines crawl their way upward, twisting around the god’s body.
Tighter and tighter they constrict, like a snake immobilizing its prey as it slowly suffocates to death.
I force it taut, the magical vines remaining unburnt as Mikais fights for air.
Shadows converge on his body, puncturing his skin with their pointed spikes and rotting the flesh from his bones.
But still he fights back. The living core of raw power inside of him still pulses.
I have to access it, have to force it to submit to me.
That much power requires me to unlock the iron-clad door within my heart that I have been avoiding.
The one that holds every ounce of self-loathing and unworthiness.
The repressed emotions flood out of me, mixing with the most powerful feeling of all—regret.
Regret for how I treated Cal.
Regret for how I fought Cal.
Regret for how I denied Cal.
Regret for the time I didn’t allow us to have.
The moment I first laid eyes on him, my soul recognized its counterpart.
My magic practically screamed it at me every day since then, but still I fought it.
I chose him for a night and felt whole for the first time in my life, but still I denied myself.
Cal wanted to turn back but I rejected him, and now his life hangs in the balance because of my stubbornness, my unwillingness to walk away from revenge and my destiny to die here.
I take one last look into the depthless seas of his gray eyes.
Home. That’s what we could have had together.
With my last moments, I will deny it no longer. He is the true owner of my broken, shattered heart. Cal is my home and I will choose him with my dying breath. There is not a path he could take that I would not follow, in this life or any other.
I push every last ounce of power coursing through my body into Mikais at lightning speed.
The sea beast on my skin thrashes wildly, the last shred of her magical protection disappearing as the connection between us shatters.
My body convulses, black spots creeping into my vision as my beating heart slows.
I have nothing left, no morsel or crumb of magic that I didn’t give for him. I pray that it was enough to kill one god and spare another.
The sun disappears from the noonday sky, casting the throne room in total darkness as I take my final breath.